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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 in Iraq opened the door for Kurdish nationalists to move toward outright independence. Despite the recent visibility of the Kurds in the international media, little is known about their political aspirations as citizens of an autonomous region. In Secession and Conflict Zheger Hassan employs a comparative analysis to explore why Iraqi Kurdistan, despite being better positioned institutionally and economically than the similar cases of South Sudan and Kosovo, has not declared independence. In rebuilding Iraq and fighting against the Islamic State, the Kurds have cultivated important political alliances with the US and Europe, which have garnered them international economic, military, and political support. Though now well-positioned to function as an independent state, Iraqi Kurdistan has vacillated in seizing this golden opportunity to declare independence. The apparent Kurdish willingness to forgo independence runs counter to the prevailing narratives about the Kurds in the Middle East. Hassan draws not only on the history of the Kurds but also on first-hand interviews with high-ranking officials, journalists, and nationalists to provide a new window into the calculations of Kurdish leaders as they navigate the complicated politics of Iraq. Secession and Conflict offers a new model for understanding the Kurdish question in Iraq.
Imagine being physically denied access to your office, business or livelihood. Imagine being refused entry to a shop or being told who you can or cannot sit with at a restaurant. Imagine being barred from a hospital room when you or your family member needs critical care. Unthinkable? Today, these scenarios and worse are happening in 'democracies' all over the world, and could be our collective future - orchestrated by AI, Big Tech and state-sponsored apps - all in the name of 'protecting' public health with vaccine passports. The stakes could not be higher. If you do not have a vaccine passport, you will be prevented from accessing basic services, from earning a living or travelling within your own country. Even if you do have one, you will be exposed to unprecedented levels of government and corporate surveillance, data mining and behavioural control. In Scanned, investigative journalist Nick Corbishley examines and exposes the lies and overreach that underpin the wholesale erosion of personal freedoms that is happening at an alarming rate. In clear language supported by rigorous research, Corbishley uncovers how the rollout of vaccine passports not only represents an unprecedented violation of privacy and bodily autonomy, but how it perpetuates the idea that a 'small' collective sacrifice will allow us to return to normality. If things continue on the current path, Corbishley makes clear, getting back to 'normal' is never happening. Put simply, instead of a return to normality, we will see the creation of a starkly different form of existence in which most of us will have virtually no agency over our own lives. Inside Scanned, you'll also find: The massive implications of a tech-enabled digital ID, social credit systems and biometric tracking How basic freedoms and privacy are being handed over to the state and private companies without our knowledge or consent How government programmes and increased surveillance will facilitate discrimination, segregation and stigmas for huge segments of the population Few people want to be seen as outliers, especially if it means feeling responsible or being blamed for the suffering and deaths of others. 'But there is a fundamental flaw in applying the "greater good" argument to vaccine passports,' Corbishley writes, 'because the passports themselves offer precious little in the way of potential good - and a huge amount in the way of potential harm.' This is not a liberal or conservative debate. This is not a vaccinated or unvaccinated debate. This is about freedom, global democracy and how much we are willing to give up. This is about deciding when it is time to say, 'enough!'
An exploration of military responses to revolutions and how to predict such reactions in the future We know that a revolution's success largely depends on the army's response to it. But can we predict the military's reaction to an uprising? How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why argues that it is possible to make a highly educated guess—and in some cases even a confident prediction—about the generals' response to a domestic revolt if we know enough about the army, the state it is supposed to serve, the society in which it exists, and the external environment that affects its actions. Through concise case studies of modern uprisings in Iran, China, Eastern Europe, Burma, and the Arab world, Zoltan Barany looks at the reasons for and the logic behind the variety of choices soldiers ultimately make. Barany offers tools—in the form of questions to be asked and answered—that enable analysts to provide the most informed assessment possible regarding an army's likely response to a revolution and, ultimately, the probable fate of the revolution itself. He examines such factors as the military's internal cohesion, the regime's treatment of its armed forces, and the size, composition, and nature of the demonstrations. How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why explains how generals decide to support or suppress domestic uprisings.
With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernandez and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.
Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.
In a sweeping review of forty truth commissions, Priscilla Hayner delivers a definitive exploration of the global experience in official truth-seeking after widespread atrocities. When Unspeakable Truths was first published in 2001, it quickly became a classic, helping to define the field of truth commissions and the broader arena of transitional justice. This second edition is fully updated and expanded, covering twenty new commissions formed in the last ten years, analyzing new trends, and offering detailed charts that assess the impact of truth commissions and provide comparative information not previously available. Placing the increasing number of truth commissions within the broader expansion in transitional justice, Unspeakable Truths surveys key developments and new thinking in reparations, international justice, healing from trauma, and other areas. The book challenges many widely-held assumptions, based on hundreds of interviews and a sweeping review of the literature. This book will help to define how these issues are addressed in the future.
It is twenty-five years since the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda when in the course of three terrible months more than 1 million people were murdered. In the intervening years a pernicious campaign has been waged by the perpetrators to deny this crime, with attempts to falsify history and blame the victims for their fate. Facts are reversed, fake news promulgated, and phoney science given credence. Intent to Deceive tells the story of this campaign of genocide denial from its origins with those who planned the massacres. With unprecedented access to government archives including in Rwanda Linda Melvern explains how, from the moment the killers seized the power of the state, they determined to distort reality of events. Disinformation was an integral part of their genocidal conspiracy. The genocidaires and their supporters continue to peddle falsehoods. These masters of deceit have found new and receptive audiences, have fooled gullible journalists and unwary academics. With their seemingly sound research methods, the Rwandan genocidaires continue to pose a threat, especially to those who might not be aware of the true nature of their crime. The book is a testament to the survivors who still live the horrors of the past. Denial causes them the gravest offence and ensures that the crime continues. This is a call for justice that remains perpetually delayed.
In a striking departure from conventional treatments of the Greek Civil War and its effects on the people of Greece, Dangerous Citizens begins by placing it within a larger historical context beginning in 1929 when the Greek state set up numerous exile and rehabilitation camps on the Greek archipelago, and extending up until 2004 with the famous trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November. Using ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents, Dangerous Citizens examines the various tortured microhistories that have created the modern Greek citizen as a fraught political subject. Returning to ethnographic terrain that is intimately familiar to PanourgiA, she analyzes the difficulties of conducting ethnographic research on a subject matter that not only spans several decades but which has also now become historical. Dangerous Citizens also analyzes how a liberal state (Greece) engaged in a process of excision of an increasingly large segment of its population as dangerous to the nation leaving a fundamental scar that is still visible. Through detailed ethnographic work, PanourgiA shows that the past is not a space of comfort, and what people remember as the truth is deeply instructive of how people manage and negotiate the past without being mendacious.Between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of dissidents were imprisoned and tortured in concentration and rehabilitation camps. PanourgiA's anthropological focus in this book is on two particular camps that have been ignored in the scholarly literature: Al Dabaa (in Egypt) and YAros (in Greece). In Al Dabaa, Greek men from Athens were exiled betweenJanuary and June 1945. These men ranged in age from 16 to 60 and had either participated in the Resistance against the Germans during the Second World War as members of the leftist army ELAS, or were members of Athens-based ELAS Youth. They were arrested and exiled by the British Occupation Forces after the Germans retreated (in October 1944). YAros is the second camp PanourgiA focuses on, used as a place of imprisonment, first between 1947-1963, and again during the dictatorship of 1967-1974. By using a widened historical frame PanourgiA demonstrates that the effects of the Greek Civil War are palpable in the everyday lives of Greek citizens even today.
The complexity of the twenty-first century threat landscape contrasts markedly with the bilateral nuclear bargaining context envisioned by classical deterrence theory. Nuclear and conventional arsenals continue to develop alongside anti-satellite programs, autonomous robotics or drones, cyber operations, biotechnology, and other innovations barely imagined in the early nuclear age. The concept of cross-domain deterrence (CDD) emerged near the end of the George W. Bush administration as policymakers and commanders confronted emerging threats to vital military systems in space and cyberspace. The Pentagon now recognizes five operational environments or so-called domains (land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace), and CDD poses serious problems in practice. In Cross-Domain Deterrence, Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay assess the theoretical relevance of CDD for the field of International Relations. As a general concept, CDD posits that how actors choose to deter affects the quality of the deterrence they achieve. Contributors to this volume include senior and junior scholars and national security practitioners. Their chapters probe the analytical utility of CDD by examining how differences across, and combinations of, different military and non-military instruments can affect choices and outcomes in coercive policy in historical and contemporary cases.
Mass communication is used by governments to support their war efforts while media images are created or manipulated to inform, persuade or guide the consumers of those images. But this book looks beyond the obvious. The contributors examine historical and contemporary examples that reflect the role of the media or mass communication or both during wartime. The essays highlight the centrality of communication to the perpetuation and to the resolution of war, suggesting that the symbiotic relationship between communication and war is as important to understand as war itself.
Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left,Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right's authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left's social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation. "}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":12993,"3":{"1":0},"9":0,"10":0,"12":0,"15":"Verdana","16":9}" style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana;">In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity. Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left,Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right's authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left's social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation. "}" data-sheets-userformat="{"2":12993,"3":{"1":0},"9":0,"10":0,"12":0,"15":"Verdana","16":9}" style="font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana;">Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right's authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left's social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.
Of the sixty-nine professors fired nationwide for political reasons
during the McCarthy Era, nearly half were from the University of
California. A small band of men and women at California's Berkeley
and Los Angeles campuses defied the stranglehold of McCarthyism in
a refusal to sign the non-communist loyalty oath required by the
institution. While college professors across the nation meekly
acquiesced to non-communist oaths in order to keep their jobs, this
group of "nonsigners" resisted in defense of free speech.
Upon publication in 1791-92, the two parts of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man proved to be both immensely popular and highly controversial. An immediate bestseller, it not only defended the French revolution but also challenged current laws, customs, and government. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine's Rights of Man provides the first comprehensive and fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in the history of modern political thought, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. The Guidebook examines: the history of rights, populism, representative governments, and challenges to monarchy from the 12th through 18th century; Paine's arguments against monarchies, mixed governments, war, and state-church establishments; Paine's views on constitutions; Paine's proposals regarding suffrage, inequality, poverty, and public welfare; Paine's revolution in rhetoric and style; the critical reception upon publication and influence through the centuries, as well as Paine's relevance today. The Routledge Guidebook to Paine's Rights of Man is essential reading for students of eighteenth-century American and British history, politics and philosophy, and anyone approaching Paine's work for the first time.
Public opinion is one of the most elusive and complex concepts in
democratic theory, and we do not fully understand its role in the
political process. "Reading Public Opinion" offers one provocative
approach for understanding how public opinion fits into the
empirical world of politics. In fact, Susan Herbst finds that
public opinion, surprisingly, has little to do with the mass public
in many instances.
Northern Ireland has entered what is arguably the key phase in its troubled political history -- truth recovery and dealing with the legacy of the past -- yet the void in knowledge and the lack of academic literature with regard to victims' rights is particularly striking. This book analyzes truth recovery as a fundamental aspect of the transition from political violence to peace, democracy and stability in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Kirk Simpson argues that it is essential for any process of truth recovery in Northern Ireland to provide the victims of political violence with the opportunity to express and articulate their narratives of suffering within the context of public dialogic processes. He outlines a unique and original model: that victims of political violence should be enabled to engage in meaningful truth recovery through a Habermasian process of public democratic deliberation and communication involving direct dialogue with the perpetrators of such violence. This process of 'communicative justice' is framed within Habermas' theory of communicative action and can help to ensure that legitimate truth recovery publicly acknowledges the trauma of victims and subjects perpetrator narratives of political violence to critical scrutiny and rational deconstruction. Crucially, the book aims to contribute to the empowerment of victims in Northern Ireland by stimulating constructive discussion and awareness of hitherto silenced narratives of the conflict. This difficult and unsettling interrogation and interpretation of the conflict from a comparatively 'unknown perspective' is central to the prospects for critically examining and mastering the past in Northern Ireland.
Police Ethics, Fourth Edition, provides an analysis of corruption in law enforcement organizations. The authors argue that the noble cause-a commitment to "doing something about bad people"-is a central "ends-based" police ethic. This fundamental principle of police ethics can paradoxically open the way to community polarization and increased violence, however, when officers violate the law on behalf of personally held moral values. This book is about the power that police use to do their work and how it can lead police to abuse their positions at the individual and organizational levels. It provides students of policing with a realistic understanding of the kinds of problems they will confront in the practice of police work. This timely new edition offers police administrators direction for developing agency-wide corruption prevention strategies, and a re-written chapter further expands our level of understanding of corruption by covering the Model of Circumstantial Corruptibility in detail. The fourth edition also discusses critical ethical issues relating to the relationship between police departments and minority communities, including Black Lives Matter and other activist groups. In the post-Ferguson environment, this is a crucial text for students, academicians, and law enforcement professionals alike.
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, approximately four million Americans have turned eighteen each year and more than fifty million children have been born. These members of the millennial and post-millennial generation have come of age in a moment marked by increased anxiety about terrorism, two protracted wars, and policies that have raised questions about the U.S. strategies abroad and at home. The War of My Generation offers the first essay collection to focus specifically on how the terrorist attacks and their aftermath have shaped this new generation of Americans. Drawing from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and literary studies, the essays cover a wide range of topics, from graphic war images in the classroom to computer games designed to promote military recruitment to books about parents in the combat zone. David Kieran and the contributors address millennials, intersections with contemporary questions about terrorism, U.S. militarism, and U.S. foreign policy, asserting that young people are both consumers and producers of narratives that contribute to, modify, and resist discourses about 9/11 and the War on Terror. Young people have not been shielded from the attacks or from the wars and policy debates that followed; instead, they have been active participants. One study reveals that the "lived memories" of the attack have led some to link the September 11th attacks to the Holocaust as moments in which innocent people suffered but resiliently persevered. Another contribution discusses how Muslim youth in Silicon Valley embraced the rhetoric of the Civil Rights movement as they fought against the harassment, governmental surveillance, and denial of rights that has plagued them since 9/11. Revealing how young people understand the War on Terror - and how adults understand the way young people think - The War of My Generation offers groundbreaking research on catastrophic events still fresh in our minds.
Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society's choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history-and the data-reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.
Federal court confirmations in the United States have become openly
political affairs, with partisans lining up to support their
preferred candidates. Matters in the states are not much different,
with once sleepy judicial elections changing into ever more
contentious political slugfests, replete with single-issue interest
groups and negative campaign advertising. Once on the bench, judges
at every level find themselves dogged by charges of politically
motivated decision-making.
The whole world knows the face of the young man with the bright black eyes. He is in the process of becoming an icon, a symbol, similar to the famous photo of Che Guevara. The face is that of Raif Badawi, who was nominated for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize. Arrested in Saudi Arabia, he was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and 1000 lashes - a de facto death sentence. The woman who succeeded in getting such people as Barack Obama and Prince Charles to appeal personally to the Saudi King for Badawi's release is his wife, Ensaf Haidar, who began the campaign to free her husband with a self-painted poster in front of a small church in Sherbrooke, Canada. When Raif Badawi and Ensaf Haidar fell in love with each other as adolescents, they did so in violation of every moral precept in the strictly Islamic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During their clandestine love affair, the young couple had no idea that, more than a decade later, Ensaf's love for Raif would attract the attention of politicians from around the world as the blogger's wife now mobilises global public opinion in an effort to save her husband from murder at the hands of the Saudi judiciary. With a courage born of desperation, she is fighting from exile in Canada to secure the release of the father of her three children, and is bringing great pressure to bear on the murderous regime in her native country. Ensaf Haidar tells Raif's and her own story: the story of their shared liberal ideas and her fight for her husband's release.
Our world and the people within it are increasingly interpreted and classified by automated systems. At the same time, automated classifications influence what happens in the physical world. These entanglements change what it means to interact with governance, and shift what elements of our identity are knowable and meaningful. In this cyber-physical world, or 'world state', what is the role for law? Specifically, how should law address the claim that computational systems know us better than we know ourselves? Monitoring Laws traces the history of government profiling from the invention of photography through to emerging applications of computer vision for personality and behavioral analysis. It asks what dimensions of profiling have provoked legal intervention in the past, and what is different about contemporary profiling that requires updating our legal tools. This work should be read by anyone interested in how computation is changing society and governance, and what it is about people that law should protect in a computational world.
The nineteenth century, a time of far-reaching cultural, political, and socio-economic transformation in Europe, brought about fundamental changes in the role of women. Women achieved this by fighting for their rights in the legal, economic, and political spheres. In the various parts of Europe, this process went forward at a different pace and followed different patterns. Most historical research up to now has ignored this diversity, preferring to focus on women's emancipation movements in major western European countries such as Britain and France. The present volume provides a broader context to the movement by including countries both large and small from all regions of Europe. Fourteen historians, all of them specialists in women's history, examine the origins and development of women's emancipation movements in their respective areas of expertise. By exploring the cultural and political diversity of nineteenth-century Europe and at the same time pointing out connections to questions explored by conventional scholarship, the essays shed new light on common developments and problems. |
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